Tag: Designed-by-Evolution

We’ve all experienced that awkward moment when the body remembers about the beans we ate earlier. Humans are not the only ones who get a bit flatulent after eating certain foods. Cattle emanate 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions each year. To be exact, yearly 90 million metric tonnes of methane are burped and farted into the atmosphere with drastic effects on climate change. Researchers world wide are looking for ways to change the cow’s diet. Oregano, seaweed and super grass, here how scientists are reprogramming cows guts.

Hundred million years ago the snake came into existence, by slowly going from an animal with limbs to the slithering creature as we know it today. You might think that evolution worked the other way around, but if you take an x-ray of a phyton or a boa constrictor you can still see rudimentary legs in their bodies. Scientist are now trying to reverse evolution by inserting the mutated leg snake DNA into the DNA of a mouse. The test result is striking: a mouse without limbs.

While environmental organizations are fighting to save animals from extinction, scientists are working for the opposite purpose. They are creating a gene to eradicate species. Genetic engineers are, in fact, developing techniques to kill several types of mosquitoes.

The advent of digital media has brought along some health conditions. For some years now, we have seen reports involving gamer’s wrist, text neck, Blackberry thumb and iPad hand. What these conditions have in common is that they are all forms of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury), adversely affecting our muscles that may be caused by awkward positions and repetitive tasks. Recently a new injury was added to the list of tech ache, the selfie elbow.

A road safety campaign in the Australian state of Victoria exposed an educational, yet confronting picture to raise awareness on the vulnerability of the human body. Meet Graham, “the only person designed to survive on our roads”. It makes us wonder if the things that we design end up designing us.

Have you ever been to the beach and been attacked by a seagull for a potato chip? These birds choose this food over their natural selection because people-food is in more abundance and relatively easy to get. Think about it. Seagulls and other shore animals can rely (not that they should) with a steady supply of food from June – August. And every year we flock to beaches in ever-growing numbers. To meet the demands of so many consumers, towns have developed their fragile coastal and marine ecosystems into housing and recreational facilities.

There’s a factory in China that produces mosquitoes and their plan is to release them into nature to cull the population and eradicating disease. As Zika-linked microcephaly crisis continue to grow in Brazil, pressuring the World Health Organization (WHO) to announce a public health emergency, China is determined to start a pilot field study using mosquitoes infected with bacteria to help fighting the deadly disease.

Eating meat has made us who we are today: evolved, intelligent humans, able to use a verbal language. A new research suggests that not eating only fruits and vegetables but also food rich in animal proteins allowed humans to evolve, transforming both the anatomical and the intellectual levels.

We spend a third of our life sleeping, and often we are not satisfied with that time. That’s why a group of researchers thought to optimize the way we sleep, increasing our relaxation, and therefore reducing the time devoted to our naps.

Garbage dumps may not be very attractive places for us but they sure are for animals. A study published in Science Advances shows how certain groups of storks modified (and significantly shortened) their usual migration routes to pay a visit to landfills.